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Training For Greatness
by
Lincoln’s father was illiterate, and had no sympathy with his son’s efforts to educate himself. Fortunately for him, however, his stepmother helped and encouraged him in every way possible. Shortly before her death she said to a biographer of Lincoln: “I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home, as well as at school. At first he was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent. Abe was a dutiful son to me always, and we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him,–would let him read on and on till he quit of his own accord.”
Lincoln fully appreciated his stepmother’s sympathy and love for him, and returned them in equal measure. It added greatly to his enjoyment of his reading and studies to have some one to whom he could talk about them, and in after life he always gratefully remembered what his second mother did for him in those early days of toil and effort.
If there was a book to be borrowed anywhere in his neighborhood, he was sure to hear about it and borrow it if possible. He said himself that he “read through every book he had ever heard of in that county for a circuit of fifty miles.”
And how he read! Boys who have books and magazines and papers in abundance in their homes, besides having thousands of volumes to choose from in great city libraries, can have no idea of what a book meant to this boy in the wilderness. He devoured every one that came into his hands as a man famishing from hunger devours a crust of bread. He read and re-read it until he had made the contents his own.
“From everything he read,” says Miss Tarbell, “he made long extracts, with his turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copybook. The wooden fire shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when it had become too grimy for use. The logs and boards in his vicinity he covered with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft to have it at hand at peep of day. When acting as ferryman on the Ohio in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the books of the house where he boarded before he left the place, he read every night until midnight.”
His stepmother said: “He read everything he could lay his hands on, and when he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper, and keep it by him until he could get paper. Then he would copy it, look at it, commit it to memory, and repeat it.”
His thoroughness in mastering everything he undertook to study was a habit acquired in childhood. How he acquired this habit he tells himself. “Among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child,” he says, “I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life; but that always disturbed my temper, and has ever since. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their–to me–dark sayings.
“I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over; until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it west.”